Man Bartlett

Hyperallergic’s Hrag Vartanian thinks my L Magazine column on Twitter Art is off the mark. As Vartanian tells it, the term itself indicts the author. It’s a cheap ploy for headlines that fails to accurately describe these artist’s practice. Also: Why oh why, did Johnson write a column about bad twitter art and then fail to discuss the most significant artists! I’m exaggerating here for effect – Hrag wasn’t nearly so dramatic — but you get the point. Vartanian believes the examples I chose weaken an already thin case against twitter art (Joy Garnett’s #lostlibrary, An Xiao’s The Artist is Kind of Present, and Man Bartlett’s #24hPort).

Vartanian’s probably right that I could have come up with a better term than “Twitter art”, though the idea that this was a traffic friendly hook used to bring together work with no real commonality is a little far fetched. The truth of the matter is, I don’t believe the pieces have anything to do with one another past their engagement with Twitter. I never made any claims that they did, though I doubt Vartanian would have interpreted much of the article as he did had I more clearly expressed why I chose each artist.